“Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not.”
“We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things. It has forbidden to itself, with desire for what is monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”
“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious. Both are disappointed.”
“Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others.”
“He was a most offensive brute, though he had an extraordinary passion for Shakespeare.”
“One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.”
“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
“It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
“It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him”
“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”
“Each time one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”
“Even when one has been wounded by it?”
“Especially when one has been wounded by it.”